New approaches to improve crop tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses

Abstract

During the last years, a great effort has been dedicated at the development and employment of diverse approaches for achieving more stress-tolerant and climateflexible crops and sustainable yield increases to meet the food and energy demands of the future. The ongoing climate change is in fact leading to more frequent extreme events with a negative impact on food production, such as increased temperatures, drought, and soil salinization as well as invasive arthropod pests and diseases. In this review, diverse "green strategies" (e.g., chemical priming, root-associated microorganisms), and advanced technologies (e.g., genome editing, high-throughput phenotyping) are described on the basis of the most recent research evidence. Particularly, attention has been focused on the potential use in a context of sustainable and climate-smart agriculture (the so called "next agriculture generation") to improve plant tolerance and resilience to abiotic and biotic stresses. In addition, the gap between the results obtained in controlled experiments and those from application of these technologies in real field conditions (lab to field step) is also discussed. | INTRODUCTIONCrop plants are continuously exposed to multiple abiotic and/or biotic stressors, leading to hindered growth and development and, subsequently, loss of productivity and crop quality. Examples of such stress factors include both abiotic factors such as drought, salinity, and heat, as well biotic stressors such as attack by fungal pathogens and insects, among others. The severity of the effect of such stressors can be clearly attested by multi-billion dollar losses in yield (FAO 2017 report, http://www.fao.org/3/I8656EN/i8656en.pdf). Recent climate model projections show that the Mediterranean basin is one of the regions that will be influenced mostly by climate change (IPCC, 2019). For this reason, improvement of the tolerance, of relevant crops, to water deficit and heat crucial to adapt to climate changes. In this context, reducing crop yield losses and increasing agricultural water use efficiency (WUE) in the Mediterranean region,

Microbe-assisted crop improvement: a sustainable weapon to restore holobiont functionality and resilience

“…Despite the interesting features of the new biotechnology approaches, diverse main problems should be in fact to be solved yet: i) strict regulatory rules are still diffuse [ 49 ], limiting the use of genome edited or cis-genesis varieties and ii) the ability in recruiting beneficial microbial consortia is not easily tackle through them. Additionally, these new genetic technologies may produce deleterious effects in crops by genome-wide off-target mutations, making the generation of novel tolerant/resilient crops by using them a little bit more complex than expected [ 50 ]. Beneficial microorganisms constitute an important target to enhance plant features, such as productivity and/or tolerance and resilience to environmental stresses thus reducing chemical inputs [ 51 – 56 ].…”

Challenging the water stress index concept: Thermographic assessment of Arabidopsis transpiration

“…As sessile organisms, plants are exposed to several adverse environmental conditions during their life span and respond accordingly through a variety of mechanisms to survive and reproduce. Drought and salinity are major factors limiting plant functionality and growth (Daryanto et al, 2017; González Guzmán et al, 2022; Zörb et al, 2019) and their impacts on plants are exacerbating due to climate change (Corwin, 2021; Mukherjee et al, 2018). The early responses to drought and salinity have been considered largely identical (Flexas et al, 2004; Munns, 2002).…”

Genome-wide characterization of cys-tathionine-β-synthase domain-containing proteins in sugarcane reveals their role in defense responses under multiple stressors

“…Climate change is leading to more frequent extreme environmental events, such as abiotic (drought, low and high temperature, high salinity, and soil salinization) and biotic (invasive arthropod pests and diseases) stressors ( González Guzmán et al, 2022 ). Furthermore, climate change that produces various abiotic stresses has affected the incidence and geographic distribution of plant diseases and pathogens ( Burdon and Zhan, 2020 ).…”

“…Furthermore, climate change that produces various abiotic stresses has affected the incidence and geographic distribution of plant diseases and pathogens ( Burdon and Zhan, 2020 ). These environmental stressors have major impacts on food production worldwide ( González Guzmán et al, 2022 ; Karthika and Govintharaj, 2022 ).…”